machine translation

I assume that you are working with a *nix box, and that you use a bash-like shell.

You need the sentence aligned europarl corpora for each language you like to train the word alignment. Please check that the corpora have the same number of lines and that they are correctly aligned.

If you don’t want to do it, you can use the sentence aligned europarl corpora built by Els Lefever. They are raw (no xml tags, but capital letter and words not well separated), so if you want the word alignment you have to follow all of next steps. Note that they are compressed in a tar.gz archive, and that are only six languages: english, italian, french, spanish, german and dutch. If you want to use different languages but you don’t know how to do, please comment this post.

First of all

You want to do a word alignment between two languages. We call the two languages the source language and the target language. This is important in order to correctly do the word alignment, so decide which language will be the source and which the target.

I can help you saying that the word alignment is only one-to-one, NULL-to-one and many-to-one. So if you choose english as source language and french as target, you can have an alignment like this:

Image via Wikipedia

You may want to make a function like this:

that is impossible with the alignment before. In this case you have to use the french as source language, and english as target.

In the next sections, I’ll use for each file name this convention: source = .src and target = .trg

So for example, if you downloaded my raw corpora and you want to do an english (source) to french (target) alignment (like in the image above), you can think raw_corpus.src as raw_corpus.en and raw_corpus.trg as raw_corpus.fr.

Pre-processing

We have to clean up the corpora, set every word in lower case and separate every word from each other (or we can say “tokenizing”). We need the tools of the europarl maintainers, you can download it here:

Now enter the subdirectory tools, and take the script tokenizer.perl and the directory nonbreaking_prefix (they should be in the same directory!).

The nonbreaking_prefix let the tokenizer keep together words like “Mr.”. Normally the tokenizer would have broken it into two words: “Mr” and “.”, but we know that the final dot is useful, not a real punctuation.

Into tools.tgz there aren’t prefixes for every language, so I did my own. You can freely use it, and if you correct it please contact me.

Making class and cooccurrence

They are equals, but MGIZA is multi-threaded, GIZA not. My advice is to choose MGIZA, but if you have to align lot of languages you can execute multiple times GIZA for each language, so it’s your choice. I’ll write explicitly when an option if for MGIZA only.

After you have downloaded, built and installed your favourite tool, we can go forward.

Finally aligning!

You only need, now, a configuration file for MGIZA or GIZA. I use this, you only have to change “.src” and “.trg” with the correct language strings: “it”, “en”, “fr”, etc.

If you use GIZA, you have to delete the line “ncpus” from this config file. Otherwise, with MGIZA, set it to the number of cpu/core that you have. Remember that if you have a cpu with hyperthreading, you can multiply the number of core by two (I’ve an Intel i740 quad-core, so I’ve “ncpus 8”).

Cross your fingers and type:

mgiza configfile

After many hours, you’ll get as many output files as “ncpus”, in this format:

Little script for lazy ones

I did a simple script that does the things I said before, you only need to adapt it to your languages. Now it makes five word alignments, from “italian/dutch/french/german/spanish” languages to “english”. You can freely use it if you want.